Has your fantasy of skipping that lousy traffic and working from home come true?
Based on research by GetApp, over the last decade, the number of people working remotely at least once a week has gone up by 400%. Now double that statistic in the new normal!
Remote working gives the employees a chance to design their day and maintain a healthy work-life balance. Companies too are exploring this model of working to save on additional set costs on the like of office spaces, travel allowances and more.
But that’s not all!
Two-thirds of managers who were surveyed reported an increase in overall productivity from their remote employees as well.
While there are a lot of perks of the trend it still is receiving scepticism from organizations. The reason being – collaboration.
The lack of physical interactions is leading to difficulty in communicating with one another for most teams. But that’s where getting the right technology stack comes in.
1. Google Drive
Google Drive is an immensely popular cloud storage service that lets you save your data in multiple formats to the cloud and then access them from anywhere on all your devices. The cloud-based platform makes team collaboration easy with cloud storage, sharing, and access to files in a secure manner.
Drive enables you to easily collaborate with team members in real-time. They can add a comment to any file type which is then shared with your team members in real-time through email notifications. With tagging, commenting and action items Drive takes your collaboration to the next level.
2. Basecamp
Basecamp is an advanced project management tool. With Basecamp, you break up your work into separate projects. Each project contains everything related to it; all the people involved, every discussion, every document, file, task, and even the tools required for it. Additionally, the tool also has a unique feature, Basecamp Hill Charts that lets you see the progress on your tasks in a project.
With automatic check-in questions like “What are you working on this week?” Basecamp helps you stay in touch with everyone and keep things aligned across the projects.
3. Trello
Trello helps your teams collaborate and get more done with its features like boards, lists, and cards. Butler, the built-in workflow automation robot helps remove tedious tasks from your to-do lists with calendar commands, due date commands, rule-based triggers, and more.
With flexibility and accessibility, Trello fits any team’s style and is ready to help you increase your productivity while you work remotely. Personally, we love it for creating our weekly and monthly tasks and calendars across projects.
4. Slack
Slack is the go-to communication platform for your business with its numerous features that allow your teams as well as your clients to connect with you smoothly. Messaging, voice and video calls, file sharing, workflow builder, and integration with other applications like Google Drive, Office 365, and more; Slack supports collaboration on a global scale.
For example, we have separate channels for different projects. This helps us keep our conversations and file sharing streamlined at all times.
5. Todoist
Being a parent and a manager, with multiple roles, comes multiple responsibilities followed by multiple tasks. A personal task manager who could keep track of all your tasks and track their status would make life a lot easier. Well, say no more.
Todoist does exactly the same, it helps you organize and capture your tasks in a streamlined manner, help you remember deadlines, and gives you the complete picture of a task’s completion graph.
It enables collaborations with other people on the same task, allows them to comment/ notify, and makes essential information accessible to everyone. You can also link Todoist with the apps you already use like Google Calendar, Dropbox, Zapier and make it your central hub for getting things done.
6. AttendanceBot
Remote working brings time tracking as a foremost challenge for the HR, with employees scattered in multiple time zones.
Attendancebot comes with a solution to all your worries.It is people management wrapped in a beautiful application!
It allows you to track all your employee schedules, have a visual shift planning on a single dashboard.It helps you time track your employees in a way that they will want to use, it allows easy check-ins and check-out, get reminders for punch in and punch out. It also provides the HR teams with powerful weekly timesheets that can be used to draw insights.
Apart from the above absence management is another strong area that can be managed through the application by applying and approving leaves on the go, building a simple leave workflow approval and more.
We say wait no more, let your HR operations sync in with your team collaboration software and see the magic happen with Attendancebot.
7. Timezone
Remote working can call for multiple time zones. Are you checking Google for each time zone before you schedule the call? Do you end up reaching late to virtual meetings or forgetting all about them because you didn’t know the time?
We have found the perfect solution in Timezone. The application allows you to keep track of when and where your team is, letting you free of the worry of keeping a check on their location and respective time zones repeatedly as they move.
8. Notion
From Marketing and Sales to HR and Product Roadmaps, need one application that captures it all and helps the teams collaborate with proper documentation in place?
We bring you Notion; the all in one workspace application. The remote working tool has a number of use cases, based on which team is making use of it and that’s why we love it for our individual use as well as collaborative circumstances.
For example, product teams can use Notion to create a visualization of the roadmap. : They can document features that are currently being developed and those that are in the pipeline, and also seek feedback from other teams.
Similarly, marketing teams can use Notion to create content calendars, document research, create weekly reports, or even prepare blog posts across different projects, linking them to a centralized page.
9. Idonethis
Distributed teams make it imperative to keep a track of the progress of each task closely to ensure there are no delays due to communication gaps. This also helps in identifying roadblocks in a timely manner, to resolve issues that may be slowing you down as a team.
Idonethis is an app designed to make your daily check-in easy. Update your team on what’s done, what’s getting done, and what can’t be completed (and why) with just a few clicks It also helps you track your and the team’s progress across projects, and create actionable reports.
10. Mindmeister
They say everything begins with an idea. This holds true even when the teams are working remotely and can’t have physical brainstorming sessions.
In order to solve this problem, we have found a smart application called Mindmeister which is an online mind mapping tool that lets you capture, develop, and share ideas visually.
MindMeister lets you share your mind maps with as many friends or colleagues as you want and collaborate with them in real-time. Whether you’re in a face-to-face meeting or thousands of miles apart, everyone can see changes made in the mind map immediately.
11. Microsoft Teams
Microsoft Teams is another chat-based collaboration platform that brings together everything a business team needs. From chat and threaded conversations, video conferencing, calling, content collaboration with the power of Microsoft 365, and the ability to create and integrate apps and workflows that your business relies on.
Microsoft has recently released a new Tasks app in Teams to provide a unified task view across Microsoft platforms like Microsoft To-Do, Planner, and Outlook. Users will no longer require to flip between places to see them all. The feature will help consolidate and prioritize tasks along with the new List view that allows one to edit multiple tasks at once.
So if you’re not someone who likes Slack or is looking for more capabilities in a team chat, this tool is for you.
12. Zoom
As a leader among the cloud-based tele-conferencing platforms, Zoom has several interesting and alluring features that make it a compelling app for conferences for both personal and professional use.
A big part of Zoom’s appeal is simplicity. It’s easy to get started with, the app is lightweight, and the interface is relatively intuitive to use with popular features like Gallery View — a mode that allows you to see every person on the call at once — built right into the app.
With four distinct pricing plans, Zoom provides an array of offerings for the users to choose from. So if you are looking for something more than a Google Meet or a Webex, we would definitely tell you to give Zoom a try.
13. Uberconference
UberConference is conference calls done right. It’s a simple, free, and visual conferencing tool for your enterprise apps domain.
With features like voice intelligence, HD Video Meetings, Web Conferences, Local Dial-In Number, Salesforce Integration, Screen Sharing, Free Call Recording, and more UberConference certainly makes it a top contender in our list of all tele-conferencing platforms.
14. Loom
Viewers retain 95% of a message when they watch it in a video compared to 10% when reading it in text.
With Loom, you can capture your screen, voice, and face and instantly share your video in less time than it would take to type an email.
Video conveys emotion and tone of voice that text simply can’t, empowering you to build strong relationships even when you’re across the globe.
Today more than 4 million people across 90,000 companies choose Loom, with your employees spread across the globe, maybe it is time to give Loom a try?
15. Teamviewer
Uncomplicated, customizable, scalable – the perfect solution for your company while working remotely or not. IT management through a single, central web console. TeamViewer is a proprietary software application for remote control, desktop sharing, online meetings, web conferencing and file transfer between computers.
Example: You are having issues at location A while your IT team sits at Location B, just use TeamViewer to share your screen with them and give them the control to fix the problem. Once done they will transfer the control back to you.
TeamViewer’s all-in-one approach ensures that you have everything you need for both effective communication and collaborative working in one convenient package. Whether you are working from home, or wish to collaborate with colleagues abroad, the software offers you fully integrated online conference solutions for audio and video communication.
With TeamViewer, you can be certain that you are equipped with the tools you need in every team collaboration scenario.
16. Troop Messenger
Remote working and a seamless communication tool go hand- in- hand. And here we have an all in one solution with Troop Messenger. Team members can interact via instant messaging, audio and video calling, location, and file sharing, by creating multiple organized groups.
If you want to share your work with collaborators outside your organization, Troop has you covered with their feature, Orange member. It allows you to add vendors, suppliers, and freelancers as orange members who get restricted access to the workspace. Troop also allows integration with essential apps like Dropbox and Google Drive.
17. Kickidler
Remote working can turn out to be tricky when you can’t track what your employee is exactly doing and thus can’t map their productivity levels. But there is nothing that the right tech can’t solve. This is where Kickidler helps.
This is a real-time remote monitoring software that allows you to see what your employees are doing at the current moment. Based on specific settings, Kickidler automatically sends an alerts if certain employee violations occur.
The Kickidler workplace monitoring software is equipped with an intuitive interface that allows you to carry out multiple sessions of remote computer monitoring of an unlimited number of employees.
Overall, the features include time tracking, employee productivity analysis, efficiency dynamics as well as an unlimited number of real-time screens and the option to record the history of actions done on the computers.
18. CoSchedule
Due to the remote working setup, teams are losing control of their marketing process and are struggling to have a consolidated view of all their projects. CoSchedule is a marketing remote working tool that rises to the occasion and solves this issue effortlessly.
It helps you create and schedule social messages for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Pinterest. Within the tool, you can work with your team members to review, pause, and/or update scheduled social messages in real-time. You can edit key project details including project descriptions, titles, publish dates, project status, and more to provide everyone in your marketing team a transparent look at your marketing activities
Organize your marketing on the go with CoSchedule!
19. Soapbox
When you work remotely, you lose out on ad-hoc watercooler conversations that onsite workers experience. This means that when you meet, you’ll want to make the most out of this time. That’s where Soapbox comes in.
Soapbox enables remote teams to have effective and collaborative meetings. With setting concrete goals, integrated meeting notes, meeting insights and suggestion notes it ensures that a remote meeting turns out to be more than just another zoom call.
Effective meetings are a key to a high-performance team and that makes soapbox an imperative tool in your cart to help you have more organized, time-efficient, and meaningful meetings, no matter where your team is.
20. Krisp
Have that call and can’t find your quiet corner? Don’t worry, there’s one solution made just for this problem!
Krisp has stood out to be our favorite silencer application, if we may call it. With a single click, it cancels all the background noise and gives you a noise-free environment for your calls.
Krisp supports microphones, headphones, and speakers, and it is perfect for all use cases, be it remote teams, online teachers, podcasters and even call centers. And to top it all, Krisp prioritizes privacy. All audio processing happens directly on your laptop and the app doesn’t store or send any of your voice data to the servers.
So what are you waiting for, Krisp out all the noise and have your next call wherever you want!
21. Peoplebox
Managing your employees better and engaging them meaningfully is the need of the hour. You need an employee management tool that focuses on ensuring your remote team is happy, engaged, and performing well. This is where Peoplebox helps.
Using Peoplebox, you can create automated check-ins, plan one-on-one meetings, set up automated surveys to understand areas of improvement in your company, and set up ways to help employees communicate in a transparent manner.
This all-in-one employee engagement tool helps you enhance employee relationships, fix issues, and retain employees, despite being a distributed team.
Getting the right remote working tools
Remote working is a trend that despite the skepticism is here to stay and we are rooting for it. After having worked remotely for almost six years now, we have moved from managing things in silos to collaborating and getting more done. This required us to test different tools and automation over time, finally creating a tech stack of remote working tools of our own.
The above list consists of just a few remote working tools that we’ve had hands-on experience with. But there are so many more and we will continue to add them to this list as we go!
Although remember, what suits us as a team may totally differ from what you need. So remember to first identify your needs, the goals you want to achieve with remote working tools, and then looking for remote working tools!
Is there any other remote working tool that you think should be on this list? We’d love to hear all about it.
